The superpower of the PC over the previous generation was an order of magnitude more memory.

The machine itself was not necessarily faster, but the extra memory was a real game changer.

Even segmented like on the 8086 was a better solution than the banking options on 8 bit hardware. The ‘86 segment registers were much more flexible.

Long term, 640k may not have been enough, but in a text based environment, 640k is just so much more from both a data and code aspect to be really empowering.

256k and Lotus 1-2-3 was much more capable than anything an Apple could do. Having much more room for more capable code aspect as well as richer and more data.

You could do gymnastics with code overlays and data paging, but that was hard software to write and just painfully slow.

Extra memory just made things that much better.